> The claim that this law would force companies to be more efficient by having fewer meetings assumes management are rational.
It also assumes that non-exempt employees are spending 8 hours a week in unnecessary meetings. Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?
Researcher/Engineer in government here. The project I've been on for the last year has me averaging over a full day a week in meetings.
The PM (who has been in charge of the project for five years now and at the research center 25+) is "non technical", so she likes to have multiple tech roles in each meeting for "backup".
It's exactly the hell you'd expect.
On the plus side (/s), when COVID forced us telework, they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did, so I have documented exactly why everything is behind.
> they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did
Every day? Every week? You left out a word.
Every day would be awful. Every week isn't bad. At my work, we recently implemented a Slack bot that would ask you on Friday what you got done, what you wanted to get done but didn't, if you have any blockers, and what you hope to accomplish next week. Honestly, when it was first deployed, I hated the idea of it, but after a couple weeks, I had noticed that there were times when Friday came and I was thinking "I got fucking nothing done this week", but being prompted by the bot to answer the weekly questions made me stop and think harder on it, then I realized I actually was pretty productive.
I had a guy in a previous position that had a manager that started asking for those kinds of updated every Mon/Wed/Fri. After it became clear that he wasn't even reading the messages (The manager would ask about things he had just included in his report an hour prior), he started including gibberish in them.
It was a month before the gibberish was noticed. The boss was noticeably upset when he discovered the last month had been gibberish, but conceded that obviously the reports are a waste of time and stopped asking for them.
> However, Section 13(a)(1) and Section 13(a)(17) of the FLSA provide an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.
If you're a computer programmer making less than $27.63/hour (and I have been that situation living in low cost of living area), you are a non-exempt professional worker. I got 1.5x overtime, and since the company had it as policy, working evenings or weekends got a shift differential too.
> an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.
NB: California has a much higher exemption threshold for the industry: $47.48/hour or $8,242.32/mo on a salary basis.
This bill seems perfectly tailored to really screw medium businesses that aren't big enough to treat everyone like interchangeable cogs and are in blue collar industries where most employees are hourly.
Companies hiring low cost labor already play stupid games to keep people well under 40hr because benefits. They'll just plug a different number into their excel formula and send everyone their new schedules.
Salaried professionals are the ones who's time gets wasted in meetings (because there is no obvious marginal cost to doing so) but they're mostly exempt.
Had a few jobs that were mostly just meetings. Mostly because there was so much red tape, that no real work could actually get done. Think, 200 hours of various employees time to approve a 5 hour project.
> Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?
No.
Very many do not meet the salary threshold to be exempt, and others don't meet the detailed nature-of-the-job requirements (though, as with contractor status, there is a fair amount of miscategorization on the latter point that employers get away with unless it is challenged.)
It also assumes that non-exempt employees are spending 8 hours a week in unnecessary meetings. Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?